How to Automate Your Partner Program and Automatically Send Contracts

August 30, 2016

A contract makes your brand new job official, grants you shares in a start-up, forges a partnership between two organizations, or means that your agency landed a client. Just a mere decade ago a contract always meant a paper agreement. Today, however, with the frequency and distance they need to be sent in a global economy and the security needed to keep official documents safe, e-contracts from trusted cloud apps such as DocuSign are becoming commonplace. These e-contracts still do all the things listed above, they just come with the added bonus of being digital – and that means you can automate them.

Automating the sending, collection, and storage of these documents comes with the standard benefits of any workflow automation – saving time, reduces errors, eliminating manual data entry etc. – but the extra conveniences really add up towards making your business more efficient and therefore more profitable.

The easiest way to approach automating your contract process is to think about your workflow in two parts: 1. Sending the Contract (before the signer signs the contract) and 2. Storing the Contract (after the signer signs). This allows for the time between the sending of the contract and when the signer sends the signed contract back to you.

You can easily automate your partner program, NDA’s or really any contracts that need to be sent out using Workato to integrate, DocuSign for e-contracts, and Box for storage. Let’s dive deeper into a contract automation workflow inspired by both Workato’s own Partner Program Automation and the Platform Partner Program Automation Box uses internally.

I. Automatically Sending Out A Contract

If you are running a partner program you most likely have a web form on your website where people can sign up or someway to transfer leads into your Customer Relationship Management Tool (CRM) – if you don’t have a way to automatically send sign ups to your CRM, you can do that with Workato too. In this scenario, Salesforce collects the leads from our sign up form and we’ve built in a human workflow to make sure only qualified applicants are accepted.

When someone signs up and a new contact is created in Salesforce with the status “Undecided,” Workato will send a People Task notification via email to the program manager. The program manager can click into People Task, view the application information and click “Approve” or “Reject.” If the applicant is not approved, Workato will send an email asking for more information and update the Salesforce contact as rejected. If the applicant is approved, Workato will pre-populate the fields such as name and address in the DocuSign contract, send it to the applicant, and update the Salesforce contact as accepted.

People Task Alert

Approve or Reject in People Task

The Contract Sent to New Partner

Salesforce Status Updated

Recipe Logic

All of this is done automatically and requires zero intervention from the program manager outside of clicking “Approve” or “Reject” during the human workflow thanks to the Workato recipe below.

Recipes are a list of instructions that Workato follows when a trigger occurs. They are built for easy customization so you can create the workflow that fits your exact scenario.

II. Storing the Contract and Partner Collaboration

This next recipe doesn’t trigger until Workato detects that the contract has come back signed in DocuSign. When this happens, Workato will create a new Box folder named with the new partner’s email. Because it takes a few minutes for the new Box folder to create, there is a 5 minute wait time built into this recipe before Workato downloads the contract from DocuSign as a PDF and uploads the contract into the Box folder.

New Box Folder Named w. Partner Email

Contract and new Collaborator

Slack Notification

Box URL in Salesforce

Recipe Logic

The recipe also adds the partner as a collaborator to the folder so they can upload their company’s sales collateral into the folder. Finally, Workato sends a notification to a Slack announcing the new partner and providing links to the contract in Box and the partner’s Salesforce profile, then updates their Salesforce profile with the link to their Box folder.

Tracking the Partner Pipeline Has Never Been Easier

Salesforce, DocuSign, and Box are all among the best at what they do, but when you bring them together with Workato, the benefits are tenfold. This contract automation workflow enhances Salesforce, allowing you to easily see the status of your contracts in real time by simply checking Salesforce and access your contracts straight from the contact profile – no logging in and out of apps or context switching. It makes contract signing quick and easy for your partner and secure for your company through DocuSign. Documents stored in Box are fully compliant, easy to share, and can act as a hub for all materials pertaining to that partner by allowing them to upload directly into their folder. Finally, sending a notification to Slack keeps everyone in the loop, showcases your productivity, and encourages team collaboration.

If you’d like to see this workflow in action, watch the recording of our webinar with Ross McKegney, Director of Platform at Box; Aaron Burkhart, Manager of Global Strategic Alliances at DocuSign; and Markus Zirn, VP of Business Development at Workato. View the Webinar Here.